Many organizations use configuration management databases (CMDBs) to organize information relating to information technology (IT) devices including logical and physical components related to management of IT services. CMDBs comprise a repository of information related to IT components and devices. The physical or logical IT components and devices are referred to as configuration items (CI). Thus, CMDBs comprise a catalog of configuration items and information related to the configuration items. For example, a CMDB may describe a configuration item based on its technical details, its ownership, or its relationship to other configuration items.
CMDB management often involves federation. Federation comprises adding information to a CMDB or combining multiple CMDBs. During federation, the information added to a CMDB must be reconciled with existing information to reduce duplicate configuration items and ensure all information relating to a particular configuration item is added accurately. Due to the massive amount of information in CMDBs, computing power is ideally used to aid in the determination as to whether a piece of information to be added relates to an established configuration item or new configuration item. This process of reconciliation, however, presents many difficulties. In fact, accurate reconciliation is frequently cited as an obstacle to implementing a federated CMDB.
Conventional reconciliation implementation are often cited as slow, erroneous, and requiring too much manual intervention. Conventional reconciliation implementations also usually rely on choosing properties of the configuration items to compare and using simple matches between the properties to decide. There are, however, several ways in which these simple matching algorithms can fail and produce false matches and false mismatches, resulting in reconciliation errors and forcing unnecessary manual reconciliation.